An Extra Cue Is Beneficial for Native Speakers but Can Be Disruptive for Second Language Learners: Integration of Prosody and Visual Context in Syntactic Ambiguity Resolution
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fpsyg-10-02835.pdf
Description
Published version
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2.83 MB
Format
Adobe PDF
Checksum (MD5)
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Author(s)
Nakamura, Chie
Arai, Manabu
Hirose, Yuki
Flynn, Suzanne
Date Issued
January 2020
Journal
Frontiers in Psychology
Publisher
Frontiers Media SA
Citation
Nakamura, Chie et al., "An Extra Cue Is Beneficial for Native Speakers but Can Be Disruptive for Second Language Learners: Integration of Prosody and Visual Context in Syntactic Ambiguity Resolution." Frontiers in Psychology 10 (January 2020): no. 2835 doi. 10.3389/fpsyg.2019.02835 ©2020 Authors
Version
Final published version
Abstract
It has long been debated whether non-native speakers can process sentences in the same way as native speakers do or they suffer from certain qualitative deficit in their ability of language comprehension. The current study examined the influence of prosodic and visual information in processing sentences with a temporarily ambiguous prepositional phrase (“Put the cake on the plate in the basket”) with native English speakers and Japanese learners of English. Specifically, we investigated (1) whether native speakers assign different pragmatic functions to the same prosodic cues used in different contexts and (2) whether L2 learners can reach the correct analysis by integrating prosodic cues with syntax with reference to the visually presented contextual information. The results from native speakers showed that contrastive accents helped to resolve the referential ambiguity when a contrastive pair was present in visual scenes. However, without a contrastive pair in the visual scene, native speakers were slower to reach the correct analysis with the contrastive accent, which supports the view that the pragmatic function of intonation categories are highly context dependent. The results from L2 learners showed that visually presented context alone helped L2 learners to reach the correct analysis. However, L2 learners were unable to assign contrastive meaning to the prosodic cues when there were two potential referents in the visual scene. The results suggest that L2 learners are not capable of integrating multiple sources of information in an interactive manner during real-time language comprehension. © Copyright ©2020 Nakamura, Arai, Hirose and Flynn.
MIT Department
Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of Linguistics and Philosophy
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Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license
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DOI of Published Version
https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2019.02835
